The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section. Further, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section are well-understood, routine, or conventional merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
Conventional approaches for sorting physical mail items rely upon manual reading of recipient information and/or sort locations on the physical mail items, followed by manual sorting of the mail items to designated sort locations. The process may also include manually printing and attaching to the physical mail items identifying information, such as a label, bar code, QR code, RFID tag, or the like, for tracking and management purposes. These approaches are necessarily labor intensive and prone to error, especially at locations that receive a large number of physical mail items. In addition, they are not able to handle changes in sort locations that occurred after mail items were put into the sort process, which results in incorrect sorts.